Dinosaurs will shoot you in the face!

Three years ago, Ain’t It Cool News posted this review of the script for Jurassic Park IV. The storyline is that a mercenary named Nick Harris leads five specially engineered dinosaurs — named Achilles, Hector, Perseus, Orestes and Spartacus — on top-secret commando missions against whatever. The dinosaurs are outfitted with body armor and guns and other weapons, and their genetic engineering includes dog DNA (for obedience) and human DNA (for intelligence).

I am not making this up.

In fact, it sounds a lot more like the storyline for one of those direct-to-video Carnosaur cheapies that actually rented like hotcakes at the height of Jurassic Park popularity.

Here’s where it gets weirder: William Monahan and John Sayles co-wrote it.

Monahan wrote Kingdom of Heaven and WON AN ACADEMY AWARD for his script for The Departed. John Sayles’s credits include tongue-in-cheek screenplays like Piranha and The Howling, the critically acclaimed Lone Star (which was a major boost for Chris Cooper’s acting career) and The Brother from Another Planet (which was not a major boost for Joe Morton’s and might have been indirectly responsible for Joe getting taped to the floor in Executive Decision).

That’s an interesting pairing/pedigree.

Even more interesting is the fact that this crazy thing might actually be happening as we speak. The horror movie experts over at Bloody-Disgusting are reporting that Universal Pictures has begun casting the movie for filming in Hawaii later this year.

Furthermore, Laura Dern told Collider back in April that she’s going to come back as Dr. Ellie Sattler in the film, but that Sam Neill would not be back as Dr. Alan Grant (even though he was somehow blackmailed into being in Jurassic Park III).

It should also be noted that she told them on April 5, not April 1. So she probably wasn’t making it up.

It’s been six years since Jurassic Park III, which had some great new dinosaur designs but one of the worst/silliest endings ever to grace a motion picture. Do we even want another Jurassic Park, and if we do, do we want it to be about dinosaur mercenary commandos?

Say what you will about the concept, but at least it’s trying to break from the formula.